Profile of Dr. Raja Banerjee

Dr. Raja Banerjee, an organic chemist by training, has been working for ~22 years in the area of structural biology towards understanding the sequence-structure-function relationship of proteins and their relevance. With the combined expertise of experimentation (using complementary spectroscopic tools) and computation directed towards answering specific biological questions of interest, his work includes design and characterization of peptides for assessing the ‘protein engineering’ concepts, and the ‘protein folding’ principles. The concepts and observations acquired in his lab have been extended through development of new ideas for structure, function and interaction study with an effort to understand how local motifs (especially ‘anion binding’) contribute to the global function of protein utilizing non-covalent interactions. The central theme of his research expertise is designing therapeutic leads for diseases usually caused by protein folding/misfolding using the structure-based drug design strategy utilizing peptide based motifs.
Dr. Banerjee acted as Visiting Professor in several reputed Institutes within and outside the country (viz. University of Padova, Italy; University of Pune; IBSD, Manipur) and Visiting Scientists in several Premier Research Institutes (viz. Visiting Fellow of JNCASR, Bangalore, IISc, Bangalore, TIFR, Bangalore). He chaired the academic sessions in several International conference and delivered invited lectures in several international, national Conference/Seminar/Workshops within and outside the country. He has published number of research articles in reputed international journals with high impact factor. He is the Coordinator Bioinformatics infrastructural facility, WBUT recognized by DBT since 2008; executive committee member Indian Peptide Society since 2011 and acted as a Member, Coordination Apex Committee: Bioinformatics National Certificate Examination (BINC) (conducted by Department of BioTechnology, Govt. of India) 2009-2012.